Tweed

Prevention programs for eating disorders abound, though many people I’ve talked to (mostly on Twitter, because that’s where I have a lot of discussions of this type) have expressed the sentiment that limited resources might be better spent on early intervention or treatment in general. Still, it isn’t hard to understand why we still optimistically aim for eating disorder prevention; of course we would rather stop eating disorders in their tracks, before they wreak havoc on the lives of people and their loved ones. I’ve written about my own take on the “is prevention possible” debate elsewhere, highlighting some of my concerns, as well as some more optimistic sentiments about truly systemic prevention efforts.

One of the things I am most concerned about is the fact that prevention tends to take place in the school context, delivered by teachers who may or may not know much about eating disorders … Continue reading →

Definitioner

the proportion of a population having a particular condition or characteristic (e.g., the percentage of people in a city with a particular disease, or who smoke) (2)

internalization

the process through which children absorb knowledge from the social context (4)

focus groups (focus group)

groups of respondents who are interviewed together and provide information/insight into matters of interest (7)

iatrogenic

induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures (e.g., an iatrogenic rash) (3)

effectiveness

the extent to which a specific intervention, when used under ordinary circumstances, does what it is intended to do; clinical trials that assess effectiveness are sometimes called pragmatic or management trials (2)

bias

in statistics, a systematic error or deviation in results or inferences from the truth; in studies of the effects of health care, the main types of bias arise from systematic differences in the groups that are compared (selection bias), the care that is provided, exposure to other factors apart from the intervention of interest (performance bias), withdrawals or exclusions of people entered into a study (attrition bias) or how outcomes are assessed (detection bias); reviews of studies may also be particularly affected by reporting bias, where a biased subset of all the relevant data is available (2)